Mismatch

This is a book that reports a number of not-well-known facts, and offers some suggestions about what to do. The book has its technical side, but most of the detailed proofs and evidence have been cached at the book’s web site.

The authors are a former Chicago community organizer and civil rights activist turned UCLA law professor, and a former NYT Supreme Court reporter who is now a fellow of the Brookings institute.

The key facts are that

(1) The best predictors of success in college are standardized test scores and grades. (Call a weighted combination of these your “academic index”.) Holistic factors don’t trump these. Standardized test scores are valid predictors for Black, White, Hispanic, and Asian alike. Grades too, though with grades, one may need to take into account whether the school awarding the grades grades hard or easy.

(2) Most selective universities use racial preferences when deciding on admissions, and use them with a fairly heavy hand. There is a “cascade effect” in which schools at the top enroll most of the students who would be a good fit for the next tier of schools, and those enroll most of those who would be a good fit for the next tier down, and so on.

(3) There is a considerable “test score gap” situation. The average score on the SAT or the ACT, average grades, etc. run lower for Blacks than for Whites, who in turn run lower than Asians.

(4) Students generally learn best when they’re in classes pitched to their own level. If you’re a good student with a lot of ability, but you’re put into a fast-paced course aimed at honors students with finely honed skills and exceptional talent, you’ll learn less from that class than you would have learned from a class aimed at students like you, students who want to learn and have the ability, but need more guidance and more approachable homework assignments.

So it’s not a good thing to be admitted to a school where most of the students have a considerably higher academic index. Your chances of staying in school, completing your intended major, and passing gateway tests into a profession are all improved by attending a school where your academic index is roughly equivalent to that of most of your peers.

In other words, large racial preferences in admissions hurt the students who get them.

Special attention is given in the book to the most clear cut cases of this: law school, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.) One particularly telling analysis deals with how things played out before and after Prop 209 came into force in California.

This proposition outlawed racial preferences in admission to the University of California schools. For a while after it was passed, the law was to some extent observed. During this span of time, Black admissions to the most selective schools in the UC system fell. But graduation rates improved, and the absolute number of Black students completing their degrees from those schools rose. These results were in perfect alignment with the analysis given by one of the authors before the event, and in sharp contradiction to the predictions of most others.

When it comes to law school, academic index is the key predictor of success in law school. In turn, success in law school, as evidenced by good grades, and then, secondarily, as evidenced by the quality of the school, is the key predictor of success at passing the bar and then success in the profession.

In other words, these indices and grades are valid predictors.

Again, when it comes to law school, students who attend a school at which their academic index is comparable to the bulk of their peers learn more, in absolute terms, and are more likely to pass the bar and succeed in the profession, than students with the same academic index who attend a school for which their scores indicate they are mismatched.

It is, in short, a bad thing for the student to get a large racial (or legacy, or athletic) preference and be admitted to a law school where the courses will be pitched over their head.

Now, as to suggested solutions:

First, it would be nice to improve K-12 education. A test-score gap is apparent even at the start of K, but it grows over time and the problem of that growth is something the schools can address. There are schools that do far better with Black students than the typical public school, among them, some at which Black students outscore the White average. So, it can be done. These schools do not enjoy superior funding. They do enjoy superior teachers and superior student discipline. They do not cherry pick students for high prior grades or standardized test scores.

If it were possible to dismiss substantially below-average teachers, to attract and retain (with targeted raises) substantially above-average teachers, to expel intolerably disruptive students, and to shift into special, separate, classes students who have disabilities that prevent them from coping with mainstream K-12 instruction, then we could expect that the K-12 gap in public school results would at any rate narrow as it has in these charter schools, Kipp academies, and so on.

Second, and because narrowing the gap is a long term project, it would be good to at a minimum inform prospective students of the extent of the racial preference in admissions they are being offered (if any) and of the range of outcomes and odds of success for previously admitted students who got that level of admissions preference and who have already completed, or failed to complete, their studies at that school. In other words, schools should be required by law to be transparent in the way they use preferences and in the outcomes that result.

The authors also recommend that racial preferences be limited to no more than the SES preference, if any, that a school uses in deciding on admissions. They reject the idea of outright bans on racial preference in admissions, partly because experience has taught that such bans can always be circumvented. Partly, also, because a straight preference generates less of a mismatch problem than circumventions that achieve the same intended preferential effect.

Last winter, UCLA law professor Richard Sander was in demand as the debunker of affirmative action after publishing a Stanford Law Review article that said race-based preferences in law-school admissions reduce the number of black law students who pass the bar and become lawyers. Sander's more-harm-than-good claim landed him lots of press coverage and guest spots on NPR's Morning Edition and Fox's Hannity & Colmes. At that point, few statisticians had scrutinized Sander's results—like most law reviews, Stanford's isn't peer-reviewed—and his critics were pretty easy to stuff. "Several people have replicated my study," Sander said on Hannity & Colmes. "And I think it holds up very well."

Except that it doesn't. In May, the law reviews of Stanford and Yale will publish a batch of responses to Sander that destroy his key conclusion that pushing African-Americans into better and tougher schools causes them to fail the bar in droves.

[...]

Go read the whole thing if you still think Sander has any credibility. Oh, and he's a self-promoter, too. He filed an amicus brief in the Fisher v. University of Texas case that he's touting. Like most wingnuts, it seems, pushing bullshit is a money-making proposition.

Well, actually, the article by Ayres and Brooks, central to the "debunking" in question, is deeply flawed.

Read pages 78-83 of the book in question for details. In particular, on p 80, it is argued (correctly) from data that Ayres and Brooks grant to be correct, that black students who attended their first choice school did worse than students who were accepted to a more elite school but chose one from the next tier down.

Sander's credibility is unimpaired.

Any author with a point to make tries to win an audience for his point. That Sanders does this, as he should, proves nothing other than that he takes his duty as a scholar to disseminate his findings seriously.

Well, actually, the article by Ayres and Brooks, central to the "debunking" in question, is deeply flawed.

Read pages 78-83 of the book in question for details. In particular, on p 80, it is argued (correctly) from data that Ayres and Brooks grant to be correct, that black students who attended their first choice school did worse than students who were accepted to a more elite school but chose one from the next tier down.

Sander's credibility is unimpaired.

Any author with a point to make tries to win an audience for his point. That Sanders does this, as he should, proves nothing other than that he takes his duty as a scholar to disseminate his findings seriously.

Read pages 78-83 of the book in question for details. In particular, on p 80, it is argued (correctly) from data that Ayres and Brooks grant to be correct, that black students who attended their first choice school did worse than students who were accepted to a more elite school but chose one from the next tier down.

I went to Amazon.

Pages 74-79 are not included in this book preview

then there's an unnumbered page with 'Figure 5.1' on it. Nothing is 'argued', it's a chart. Then comes

Pages 81-206 are not included in this book preview.

but you probably knew that. But wait, there's a footnote for the source of the data in figure 5.1, it's Doug Williams. How credible is his work?

Sander and Taylor now claim that Sander’s earlier work is “confirmed” by economist Doug Williams, who has been a frequent co-author of Sander’s for decades. Williams’s works on law school mismatch are in unpublished working papers and have been critiqued as untethered to the real world and methodologically suspect (Camilli & Welner 2011). In the paper most prominently mentioned, half his sample’s black students are dropped from the analysis, and three-quarters of those he treats as presumably not “mismatched” attended historically black law schools, which in important ways are unlike the nearly two hundred other U.S. law schools. Relatedly, Professor Williams acknowledged at a recent conference that he cannot differentiate his findings from the positive effects that would result from being at a school with high numbers of minority students.

That source is something you both should read, lostlakehiker and Dark_Falcon, before you continue to promulgate this bullshit. It won't necessarily stop you from promulgating it, but it least it will be clear, if I know you've read that article, that you do so not because it is correct, but because it fits your agenda. If you like, (and maybe even if you don't) I can explain why that agenda is racist even if you don't think it's racist. Here's another bit from it:

Because Sander and Taylor write so confidently, many readers will be unaware that the key studies on which their claims are based have never passed the test of peer review, and several remain unpublished. Take, for example, their claims about mismatch and African-American law students. Numerous attempts to replicate Sander’s (and Taylor’s) claimed results have been unsuccessful. The research consensus that emerges – not just from what two of us have written, but also from independent analyses and reviews by Ayres & Brooks; Dauber; Wilkins; Rothstein & Yoon; Ho; Holzer & Neumark; Barnes; Camilli & Jackson and Camilli & Welner – is that Sander has never provided reliable evidence of systemic mismatch effects in U.S. legal education, particularly at the most selective schools.

This "debunking" relies on arguments such as this: "One way to increase the number of black lawyers might be to write a test that relies less on trick multiple-choice questions"...etc.

That's the sort of thing that if a right-wing person said it, it would instantly be recognized for what it is: demeaning and patronizing. Trick questions are part of questioning witnesses and part of the practice of law. A good lawyer can riddle them out.

Sander and Taylor are neither right wing, nor racist. Nor am I. (Take global warming, for instance.) But I know from direct personal experience that mismatching students to class pace and content causes avoidable failure. It doesn't matter the race of the mismatch victim, or the reason for the mismatch.

The author of the "debunking" even granted that it made sense that this should be so. Her argument was to pick nits: Sander, according to her, claimed that this effect was stronger than she thinks is warranted. Not that she did her own statistical analysis or anything.

The "debunking" never addressed the key facts. It relied on the "Gish Gallop" approach. Spread the argument, bring up side issues, and lay down a barrage.

The other "debunking" page states that "Any racially neutral measure of merit, apart from the test scores themselves, will reproduce these population differences."

The very meaning of "racially neutral measure of merit" is whatever correlates best with chances of graduating on time and with good grades. The best known such measure is some version of the academic index that Sander and Taylor use: part SAT or ACT score, part high-school grades. (Or college grades, if it's law school admissions that are at issue.) Implicitly, Lempert, Kidder, and Levine, to have a point, need it to be the case that this academic index is a poor predictor of success down the line. But that is simply not the case. Mismatch as measured by grades and SAT scores IS mismatch.

Finally, if Sander were the clown you say he is, he'd not be a law professor at UCLA. Nor would Taylor be a fellow at the Brookings Institute, which is no RW think tank. In fact, according to Wikipedia, it is liberal. Given how controversial the analysis they offered is, the only way they could still be standing is that their facts and logic are pretty sound.

I'll oppose hurting people in the name of helping them. If that's racist in your mind, believe as you like.

Are you addressing me? Some of what you say should be addressed to someone else. Much of what I linked to you don't address.

You are joining with Sander in opposing 'hurting people in the name of helping them', but neither of you has shown that affirmative action does this. So there must be some other reason you oppose affirmative action, or you are deluding yourself for some other reason.

'But that is simply not the case.' does not prove anything.

I didn't say Sander is a clown. Being part of any faculty is not proof of correct positions on anything.

This is why I said at the top that I wasn't going to bother. I'm done bothering now.